The Bark Cutters (5 page)

Six days a week they toiled; digging, panning, shifting dirt. On the Sabbath they bathed and read the bible, and then Hamish, practising his reading, would study any material he could obtain as Charlie slept the day away, exhausted. They found no rich deposits, yet what they did mine was enough for food and they managed to save a little. Hamish kept the small wad of notes in his boots. As Hamish suspected, Charlie's health was not improving. However, having decided on a departure date, he ensured the few remaining weeks spent at the fields did not go to waste. He perfected his habit of eavesdropping on conversations, becoming so observant that his nickname, ‘silent one', became common place. He watched other teams bickering and learnt to soothe things in his own. Before punishment was meted out to thieves, he asked what drove them to commit such acts, and all the while he watched the Chinese labouring with diligence, wincing at the savage treatment they received.

It was at night though, with the stars illuminating his imagination, that Hamish sought the answers to an unknown land and marvelled that he lay cocooned in such vastness. For settled on the outer limits of a stranger's campfire, in a landscape peppered by the bodies and small lives of the desperate and the adventurous, he discovered the magnificent tracts of land waiting unclaimed beyond the hills of the known. These wild, unimaginable spaces were stalked upon by the dark peoples who roamed the bush. There were renegades, the old-timers told him; starving renegades, anxious to protect their land from settlers, wary of the whites. He learned of the mass killings of the blacks in the early days of settlement, of white settlers murdered in revenge, and of the convicts: those who continued to steal, those who had been freed, those who were forced to cut a swathe in the bush and those, woman and man alike, who rotted in chains.

This then was his new country and Hamish embraced it like a father to a first born, for within its sour interior lay the sweetest of fruit – livestock. Only cattle and sheep enchanted Hamish. Everything else, imperative to learn though it was, merely served his survival in this wild place he had chosen to ride. He clung to the stories surrounding the great mobs of stock traversing the inland. The ex-drovers reeled him in like a slumbering yellow belly and through them he learned of the huge numbers of cattle traversing the country to saleyards, and of the sheep, the Merino. This creamy gold, buried beneath the daggy exterior of dirt and mud and urine and burr, would be his salvation.

It was an old shaft, left in disgust some six months back, yet Hamish had a feeling about it: a deep feeling in his gut that it would change his life. He began repairing it as best as possible. The timber supports took time, but they now lined twenty-five
feet of the old mine. Lamps placed every six feet illuminated the dank tunnel. At the end of it lay a further five feet of dirt, then rock. This was the culmination of a week's work.

‘Let us go back to the creek, Hamish,' Charlie pleaded. He was not yet sixteen years, yet his brother's daily battle for gold was now beyond his endurance. In truth the illness crept upon him so slowly that he had not realised the extent of the sickness until it was too late. Now his nights were sweat-inducing nightmares, his days, ribbons of pain that struck at his joints. At least panning in the creek gave him sun and fresh air. ‘There was dust enough there to keep us fed.'

Lifting his pick, Hamish struck the surface in swift movements. One day he hoped for bigger concerns than the neverending quest to keep bellies full and his young brother quiet. To his left, a further five feet on, the sounds of Charlie shovelling carried eerily in the gloom.

‘Are you trying to kill us both then?' Charlie called out into the darkness.

‘I'm trying to make money, lad.' Hitching slipping braces over his calico shirt, Hamish brought his lamp closer to the rock. The seam once dreamt about did not appear beneath the flickering light. ‘Damn it!' In response the dank cavern rumbled.

‘Did you want me to admit then that I was wrong? Is that what you've been waiting to hear these past three years?' Charlie continued.

Scrunching his head down deep into his shoulder blades, Hamish considered what it would mean to go back to panning in the cold water to the jeers and scornful asides of those older hands who advised to leave the useless mine alone. Dirt trickled from the roof, gathering beneath his shirt collar, crusting the sweat in the hollow of his back before landing in the waistband of his trousers. The lamp flickered, threatened to go out, then it regained its former brightness.

‘Tell me then, brother,' Charlie persevered, ‘what would you have done?'

Hamish sighed and lifted the wooden handles of his barrow. He'd managed to avoid this conversation for months and he intended to keep doing so. To reopen the wound would surely damage his relationship with his brother.

The rush of clean air and unrestricted light struck Hamish as he strode from the opening of the mine with a barrow of dirt, his chest easing as the constriction of the tunnel released its grasp. Dumping the earthy contents in a nearby pile, he sat heavily on downtrodden vegetation only twenty feet from the reinforced entrance. The time drew close for their departure, and it was none too soon for Hamish. It wasn't just the rough winter and the unceasing digging for little reward; his brother's health demanded it. Already 1857 was near halfway through, as good a time as any to move on. Loath to admit it, the thought of leaving Charlie safe in a small town appealed to him, not just for the boy's own health, either. How much faster the trip north would be, how unencumbered.

The sound, loud as the crashing of waves, rolled towards him where he lay sprawled in crushed spinifex grass, an index finger searching out wax from his ear.

‘Charlie!' he roared, scrambling to his feet. Dirt and dust billowed out as if from a dropped bag of flour, engulfing his body, nose, eyes and throat; as if the ground swayed beneath his very feet.

Charlie lay flat on his back in a low-slung camp bed, the flicker of an oil lamp forming intricate patterns of light and shade on his pained face. Outside, a shadow rippled past the canvas wall and Lee entered the tent with broth. He removed Hamish's
untouched plate of dripping and bread as Hamish poured the green trickle of the broth into his brother's mouth, rubbing his throat to make him swallow.

‘I didn't know what to do,' Charlie whispered. ‘I felt I had to follow ye, Hamish. I would have stayed in Scotland if not for ye.'

Hamish leaned over his brother, ready to pour more broth, ‘It'll help your pain, Charlie. Lee said it would.' The liquid bubbled and spluttered across the boy's face. ‘Damn.' Placing the small wooden bowl on the dirt floor, he wiped the boy's face roughly.

Charlie's eyes darted about the room. ‘And having stayed I'd have seen nothing of this life. I'm sorry not to see your sheep, Hamish.' The creases around his eyes smoothed.

Hamish wiped a damp cloth across an almost unrecognisable forehead, recalling each long mile travelled.

‘I remember sitting at Mother's feet …'

‘Save your breath, lad.' He did not want the boy's last thoughts to be that of their miserable life in the Highlands. Yet, he thought sadly, he had not been able to replace that life with something better, at least not in Charlie's eyes.

‘Father knew he'd not be seeing us again,' Charlie whispered. ‘The day we left, the way he looked at us, he was still watching when we crossed the second burn.' His voice wavered. ‘Do ye think Ma and the wee ones were watching? Sometimes I thought Ma was here with us.'

Hamish nodded. There was no minister, Presbyterian, Catholic, nothing. The priest had died two months earlier of the sickness, and the other had vanished some weeks back, some say killed by blacks. Hamish searched frantically for a word of comfort. ‘God bless.'

Charlie's eyes crinkled in a half-smile of sympathy and regret. ‘It was not just Mary's fault you know.'

‘Quiet, lad.'

‘Father kissed her back.'

So then, that was the truth of it.

‘You loved her so. I wanted your image of her to remain untainted, but I was wrong to do so. Forgive them, Hamish.'

They had both betrayed him.

‘I wish I were going with you.' Charlie's voice dropped away like a coin down a well.

Hamish pulled his little brother roughly to his chest, the movement sending the lad unconscious. Frantically he tried to force more of Lee's drug down the boy's throat, until the insistent pressure of the Chinaman's grip on his shoulder caused him to stop. Gradually the lad's eyes flickered and reopened. His clammy skin, yellow in the light, appeared to cool ever so gently as Hamish held him close.

‘I'll be watching, Hamish. I've walked through your dream, tasted it. You have to live your life for the two of us.'

When the night was at its blackest, Charlie drew his last breath. Behind him Hamish heard the barely audible sigh of Lee. Carefully he laid his brother down on the camp bed. With a nod he left the body in the care of the Chinaman.

The grave was deep. Much deeper than the usual plots scattered on the far northern boundary of the goldfields. Hamish, Lee and Dave, a loner who had elected to join them, lifted Charlie's body above the pit. It was not yet dawn.

‘Are ye ready then?' Dave asked. His impatience, evident since birth some twenty-five years prior, currently lay curled in his throat, along with the aching beat of his one-inch-shorter left leg. Had humour ever rested within his small frame, the hanging of his father for theft and the death of his mother in some tavern further south had surely drowned all hope of character reformation. He cleared his throat, once, twice. The dawn mist lifted
steadily, removing its wet cloak from their faces and clothes. Dave dared not move, yet the lad grew heavy between them, heavier and stiffer.

A few feet away wallabies hopped shyly from sleep into the new day and stopped to nibble tentatively at the green butts of grass. Dave watched the small animals hungrily, his nostrils flaring at the thought of the young flesh roasting succulently. A small pan to catch the juices, a chunk of doughy bread, he could feel the fat glazing his lips and whiskers. His stomach rumbled noisily. ‘An unnatural time for a burial,' he grunted as they finally lowered the hessian-swaddled body into the damp soil. Disturbed, the wallabies crept quickly into the ridge of trees behind them.

Hamish concentrated on shovelling the clods of dirt over his brother until the earth was mounded above him and the stirrings of the cramped quarters of the fields could be heard below.

‘A far distance we travelled and this …' Hamish gestured towards the glowing dawn sun. ‘Anyway,' he turned towards Dave, ‘now he has seen the start of a new day.'

Lee touched his arm. ‘He good man.'

‘Yes,' Hamish agreed. Charlie had followed him to the other side of the world out of a sense of loyalty. And out of love he had kept his own council regarding Mary's betrayal.

Dave backed away silently to join Lee who, having finished burning a fragrant offering in the cold air, stamped it out with his sandalled foot before walking to the dray. Scooping up a fistful of dirt from the burial mound, Hamish placed it in his pocket and turned his back on the fields below.